Big other: surveillance capitalism and the prospects of an information civilization

By Shoshana Zuboff. 2015

2,248 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Political Science and International Relations

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

In Safety, Robustness & Interpretability

Citations in the corpus

Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision (2021, background): “Our inclusion of surveillance is not intended to indicate enthusiasm for this domain - rather, we think surveillance is an important domain to try to make predictions about given its societal implications (Zuboff, 2015; Browne, 2015).”
MERLOT: Multimodal Neural Script Knowledge Models (2021, background): “The video QA tasks that we studied carry risk of dual use, through possible downstream applications like surveillance [91, 128].”
The challenges and limits of big data algorithms in technocratic governance (2016, methodology): “The reliance of algorithm (software analytics) to process and interpret vast amount of data from location sensors and other offline and online data collection devices reflect the “accumulation logic” of big data (Zuboff, 2015).”
Debating big data: A literature review on realizing value from big data (2017, background): “…users, and publics that are both data sources and recipients of data-based products are becoming increasingly active (Bhimani, 2015) and should be considered legitimate network participants as well (Constantiou and Kallinikos, 2015; Ekbia et al., 2015; Zuboff, 2015; Kennedy and Moss, 2015).”
What Do Platforms Do? Understanding the Gig Economy (2020, background): “Some platforms also benefit from network effects, producing the concentrated markets and user lock-in that investors find so attractive, or from the harvesting of user data as a collateral source of value (see Rosenblat 2018; Srnicek 2016; Zuboff 2015, 2019).”
Tourism and COVID-19: Impacts and implications for advancing and resetting industry and research (2020, neutral): “Technologies are constituted by unique affordances, whose development and expression are shaped by the institutional logics in which technologies are designed, implemented, and used (Zuboff, 2015).”
Secrets and Likes: The Drive for Privacy and the Difficulty of Achieving It in the Digital Age (2020, background): “The rise of surveillance as an economic model (Zuboff, 2015) has implications other than firms’ overinvestments.”
Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance (2019, background): “Nevertheless, all these assumptions should be contested and analyzed in a broader framework that considers how this form of knowledge production increases capital concentration (West 2017), surveillance (Zuboff 2015), and colonization (Couldry and Mejias 2019).”
‘Hypernudge’: Big Data as a mode of regulation by design (2017, neutral): “As Zuboff chillingly observes, Google’s tools are not the objects of value exchange, but ‘hooks’ that ‘lure users into extractive operations that turn ordinary life into the daily renewal of a 21st century Faustian pact’ (Zuboff, 2015, pp. 83–84).”
The Management of Visibilities in the Digital Age: Introduction (2016, background): “Just think about the impact of PRISM and related surveillance programs set up by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the scholarly assertions that we now live in a “surveillance society” (Lyon, 2001) or a “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff, 2015).”
Social Injustice in Surveillance Capitalism (2017, background): “Some form of ownership could empower people to reap the value of personal data, economic or otherwise, yet considerably more attention from the legal domain is needed, to address the “lag in social evolution” that has been exploited by surveillance capitalists (Zuboff 2015: 83).”
The limits of transparency: Data brokers and commodification (2018, background): “All of this points to data brokers’ position within a “surveillance industrial complex” (Ball and Snider, 2013; see also Zuboff, 2015) in which a range of private and public institutions conduct expansive monitoring across communications networks.”
The digital platform: a research agenda (2018, background): “This raises a number of critical issues regarding the power dynamics and the direct impact of these digital innovations on everyday life, for example in terms of surveillance, labour market relations, and the distribution of wealth beyond a simplistic argument based on technical rationality (Zuboff,”
AI governance in the public sector: Three tales from the frontiers of automated decision-making in democratic settings (2020, neutral): “With the growing global disen-chantment with the current state of digital economy (also defined surveillance capitalism by Zuboff, 2015), the only constant is the intrinsic need to innovate.”
The technostress trifecta ‐ techno eustress, techno distress and design: Theoretical directions and an agenda for research (2019, background): “In terms of characteristics of the organization, a surveillance prone culture implies IS enabled monitoring of employees, which can generate in them, fears of job insecurity, loss of privacy, and infringement of personal space (Fairweather, 1999; Zuboff, 1988, 2015).”
Artificial Intelligence in Education: 20th International Conference, AIED 2019, Chicago, IL, USA, June 25-29, 2019, Proceedings, Part II (2019, methodology): “Thus, the tutor will choose to ask the question in the highest possible level of the LOR that has a predicted probability of at least 40% of being answered correctly [2].”